Ordinary People

David Wagner explores the lives of poor people during the three decades after the Civil War, using a unique treasure of biographies of people who were (at one point in time) inmates in a large almshouse, combined with genealogical and other official records to follow their later lives. Ordinary People develops a more fluid picture of "poverty" as people's lives change over the course of time. chapterOne Ordinary People; chapterTwo The Context: The Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury, Immigration, and Industrialization; partOne Mobility: Geographic and Economic; chapterThree The “Uprooted”: Immigrants and Migrants; chapterFour Falling Down: Yet a Surprising Resilience; partTwo The “Crisis” in the Family; chapterFive “Criminal Intimacies”: Out-of-Wedlock Births; chapterSix Family Conflict and Desertion; partThree Age and Poverty: Children and the Elderly; chapterSeven Being “Put Out”: Children in and out of the Almshouse; chapterEight “We Can Do Nothing for Him”: The Fate of the Elderly; chapterNine From History’s Shadows: Part Ial Views of the Poor;